"The further a society drifts from the truth, the more it will hate those who speak it." Orwell

"Men are so simple of mind and so dominated by immediate needs that the deceitful man can easily find those ready to be deceived."
Machiavelli

"Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities." Voltaire

Sunday, September 4, 2011

Missed Opportunity

Today, on Face The Nation, explanation 3.0 from Michele Bachmann for her claim that recent hurricanes and earthquakes are a message from god (a message, one notes, that pretty much wholly missed the city at which she claims he was aiming, while murdering a couple dozen innocents and causing billions in damage):

"I believe in God. I'm not ashamed to say that I believe in God. I'm a woman of faith and a woman of prayer, but the comment that I made right then was a metaphor. That was very simply what I was doing," Bachmann replied.

The followup question is obvious. Sadly, and predictably, it never came:

2 comments:

Sam Spade
said...

Glad to see you back on your horse, Sid.

I emptied a box of raisins onto the floor and, after a careful study of how they lay, have seen that in fact there is no real controversy over her statement and her contradictory interpretations thereof. That's the sort of thing she says all the time. One might just as well feel outrage when Grover Norquist froths about entitlement spending.

What's happening in truth is that the media have turned on her. Perry weakened her, and now they smell blood and are taking her down.

To be clear, I have zero sympathy for Bachmann. I do resent the media for constructing these narratives for our little minds.

Incidentally the other day I was struck by the daintiness of Vlad Horowitz in comparison to Aunt Mildred, who was... not dainty. I exchanged their hair with Photoshop but then felt an alien sensation. It might have been shame, I wouldn't really know.

For The Sake of My Sanity

Some will know me from my other blog, "Surgeonsblog." Of late I've given over to frothing at the mouth as the world descends into stupidity, and our politics and our citizens seem, in numbers enough to be meaningful, unable to see it. So for now I'm leaving surgery writing behind, if for no other reason than to defuse and diffuse my unrelenting sense of doom, and with no expectation of making a difference. These are things that, to me, are obvious. Except that, apparently, they aren't.

RWS™

RWS™: For those who drop by here in the middle, and wonder what it means: it's my shorthand for Right Wing Screamers, which includes such a long list it's tiresome to type it. (I distinguish these blowhards from thoughtful conservatives, of whom I sort of take it on faith that there must still be some.) You know who I mean: Palin, Beck, O'Reilly, Limbaugh, Hannity, Coulter, Breitbart (RIP), Malkin, Savage, Levin, Ingraham, Doocey (more of a drooler than a screamer), Hewitt, Goldberg, Gingrich, Kristol, Scarborough (+/-), Bachmann, Inhofe, Bond, Broun, Boehner, Kelley, Santorum, Cain. To name but a few. Behold them in their unrepentant disregard for reality: the RWS™